Communication number, such as a telephone number, is the privacy of user that sometimes has to be provided to third parties for communication. The technical problem concerns how to conduct the communication with third parties without disclosing the user's communication number to the third parties.
Generally, privacy refers to certain personal information that a person or other entity is not willing to share with others. With the development of social economics, too many privacy leakage cases occur, which causes great concern about the protection of privacy.
A telephone number is an example of information a person may want to maintain as private. A person may selectively inform others of his/her own telephone number to maintain communications between the person and the selected others, but may not want his/her own telephone number to be is otherwise distributed, which could lead to cheating calls, various promotion advertisements, junk short messages, as well as other adverse consequences.
Unfortunately, it is difficult for a network system under the conventional techniques to protect user privacy, especially telephone numbers. For example, in daily life, when people usually conduct online shopping or online taxi booking service, the network system under the conventional techniques requests the users to provide telephone numbers, so as to facilitate communications with online stores, logistics companies, or taxi drivers. Accordingly, the online stores, logistics companies, or taxi drivers obtain the users' names and telephone numbers through the network system. In this way, after a long-term operation, the online stores, logistics companies, or taxi drivers can accumulate a large number of contact information of the users. If their business operations or managements are conducted inappropriately, the users' contact information may be leaked, that is, user privacy is leaked. Moreover, after the consumers buy some commodities or services, they also acquire the sellers' contact information. In some cases, if the consumers feel unsatisfied with the seller, they may frequently hassle the seller. Therefore, the network under the conventional techniques is hard to effectively protect user privacy.